Abstract: The lecture focuses on the historical situation in Bavaria from the 1860s to the 1910s, when the great demand and international competition of museums and of private collectors for German art – mostly for the late Gothic wood sculpture stemming from the region’s churches and convents – along with the creation of the national collections of German art in Berlin led to successful acquisition campaigns that deprived Bavaria of extensive parts of its artistic patrimony. The adoption of new collecting policies by the Bavarian museums, like the Germanisches Nationalmuseum in Nürnberg and the Bayerisches Nationalmuseum in Munich, which worked to safeguard the artistic patrimony of the region against outflow abroad, the competition of the Bavarian museums with the national museums in Berlin, along with the reactions of local art historians and intellectuals and creation of municipal art collections across the region will be analysed to present three levels of opposition to the aggressive musealization and predatory art market in the late-nineteenth-century Bavaria.

Joanna Smalcerz received her PhD from the University of Bern in 2017. She works on the history of the Italian art market and collecting in the late nineteenth century, the reception of the Italian Renaissance art, and the intersection of art trade, art historical scholarship and the nineteenth-century politics of cultural patrimony, with a special focus on spoliation of cultural heritage. She worked on the Project for the Study of Collecting and Provenance at the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles and was Research Assistant and Lecturer at the University of Bern, as well as Visiting Lecturer at the University of Basel. She is the author of Smuggling the Renaissance: The Illicit Export of Artworks Out of Italy, 1861-1909 (Brill, 2020) and the editor of Wilhelm Bode and the Art Market: Connoisseurship, Networking and Control of the Marketplace (Brill, 2023). Her work has been supported by Bibliotheca Hertziana – Max Planck Institute for Art History in Rome, Villa I Tatti – The Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies in Florence, Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz – Max-Planck-Institut and Zentralinstitut für Kunstgeschichte in Munich. Currently she is Assistant Professor at the University of Warsaw and Associate Scholar at the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz.